A Page in the Life: Rian Malan

Not so long ago I shared a platform with Rian Malan at a literary festival, and we were asked about literary success. Malan said: “Don’t ask me, I am a one-hit wonder.” As he approaches 60, Malan is both burdened and blessed by the fact that nearly 25 years ago he wrote the astonishing My Traitor’s Heart, a memoir of his life as a young Afrikaner South African, and a book like no other to come out of the cramped literary world of South Africa. It was a worldwide success but he has not written another book since. Instead, he has been a prolific journalist and a vigorous and fearless contrarian.

I have some problems connecting with him. I am in Cape Town and he is in Johannesburg. His phone message is a rant about the cost of local calls, and it says he will only accept texts. He calls eventually and says he will be in Cape Town, laments the fact that I no longer drink and suggests we take a large spliff and walk in the mountains in lieu of a conventional interview.

But there is a problem: he fails to appear. I hear rumours of a riotous wedding reception, at which his band was playing, that ended with Malan sacking his violinist on stage, sleeping overnight in his car and forsaking music for ever.

Music is very important to him. When we finally talk, he tells me his band, Ensemble Borsalino, plays a fusion of Afrikaans traditional music and gipsy-Jewish music. I have no idea how this would sound. I think that he turned to music as a way of reaching deeper into Africa, the Africa of the Afrikaner in particular; he longs for something more elemental than the self-serving and never-ending discussion of South Africa’s prospects. He particularly loathes those liberals who take up a position of virtue. He names Bono. In a way, he is longing for the simple, Arcadian life of the prelapsarian Afrikaner.

Although he is Afrikaans in origin, he went to a progressive English-language school in Johannesburg. He says he is still trying to ingratiate himself with Afrikaners; in his mind, there is a sense that the Afrikaners are romantic figures, true Africans. In their history, he sees something significant, not just about their predicament in the new South Africa, but in their relationship to Africa. He tells me that the average white South African has not understood the extent of what has happened and continues to live blithely in a fool’s paradise.

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He also points out that many of the disasters Afrikaners predicted have come to pass under the inept and corrupt African National Congress (ANC) government. But, he says, he is just a cut-price iconoclast. Sometimes he claims that nothing he has ever written is ultimately true; he quotes approvingly one of his former colleagues from his stint on Rolling Stone, that there is no such thing as a true story.

His views on HIV are no less controversial. He wrote a few years ago that the rates of infection in Africa were not nearly as high as had been forecast; he blamed computer modelling and activists who wanted to raise money: “Good news had to be suppressed.” He also discovered that the death rate in South Africa had remained stable or even declined at the time an apocalypse was predicted. He says he never denied that HIV was a problem, particularly in certain areas; he just believed it was not as big a problem as predicted: “What can I say? If we were all supposed to be dead, we aren’t.”

In the introduction to his new collection of essays, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, he writes: “When I came home in the Eighties, I saw that I was in Africa and that changed everything. Those I had left behind became obsessed with apartheid. I became obsessed with South Africa’s pain. I thought we were doomed unless we figured out what had gone wrong elsewhere in Africa, and how to avoid a similar fate. I was an atheist in the great revival tent of the new South Africa. The faith on offer was too simple and sentimental, answers it offered too easy.” This is Malan’s manifesto, to which he has remained true.

From the first, he was sceptical about the ANC, but at the same time torn. An excellent piece on Invictus (2009), the film about Nelson Mandela’s manipulative and symbolic role in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, illustrates these mixed feelings. Malan admits being won over and weeping in the cinema. He says that even now there are times when he thinks the country is doomed, and other times when he thinks it has infinite possibility. He tells me that all his life he has heard that the whole thing will blow up, and yet it never has.

But the Zimbabwe model of nationalisation, advocated by the absurd – and authentically racist – Julius Malema, who was recently ousted from the ANC Youth League, is always a possibility if the ANC ever looks like losing an election. That way lies instant economic ruin. As Malan says, Malema hates the comparatively efficient and orderly Cape Province, because it is run by a “little white racist girl”, who is in fact the middle-aged leader of the multiracial Democratic Alliance. Much malevolence is invested in that remark.

I tell Malan I have noticed that “racist” seems to describe anyone who criticises the ANC strongly for corruption or incompetence. Malan agrees. But he says that if you haven’t been called a racist in South Africa, you were not there. Or as he puts it in his book: “Any South African journalist who hasn’t been called a racist or a self-hating house Negro is a fawning ingrate whose lips are chapped from sucking the unmentionable appendages of those in power.” How do you live in this strange place, I ask. “I have no f------ idea,” he answers.

One of the weightier pieces in his new collection tells of how he went into bat for the family of Solomon Linda, the man who composed the tune of Wimoweh, which became The Lion Sleeps Tonight, recorded by Pete Seeger. Seeger described it as the most notable of the songs he sang for 40 years. Many others also recorded versions of the tune. Malan says that when he heard about Solomon Linda, he wondered where all the money earned in royalties and rights had gone. After years of correspondence and agitation, he helped secure a payout for the Linda family and a share of any future earnings from The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

In confidence, Malan told me the amount. It’s a lot. This has already allowed the two surviving daughters of Solomon Linda to buy cars “for crash-prone sons, and commence a turbulent but no doubt pleasurable adjustment to life in the middle classes”. What prompted Malan to mount this extraordinary and persistent campaign is his sense of fairness. Linda himself made virtually no money from his composition, and spent his days as a menial in the recording studio. Malan sees this as inexcusably unjust: he is not interested in generalisations, or political theories, or rosy speculation, or myths, or race theory, but in simple justice. He adds that South Africa is a gift to the journalist: every day it produces some new and bizarre story you can barely believe, let alone invent.

Malan is South Africa’s Christopher Hitchens, similarly touched with genius. He makes the conventional journalism of the country look pale, lifeless and predictable. Long may he continue his task of “nipping at the heels of the rich and famous”, which he believes is the only way a journalist in South Africa can retain his dignity.

* Rian Malan’s The Lion Sleeps Tonight and Other Stories of Africa is published by Grove Press at £16.99. Justin Cartwright's latest novel is Other People’s Money (Bloomsbury)